Well, in most cases you won’t need a breadboard and the reason for that is the way the Tinusaur Board has been designed with 2 2-row headers that give you enough pins to do some prototyping directly on the board.

The 2 outer rows are alwaysGND while the 2 inner rows are always signal (except when they duplicate the GND), and the Vcc is inner as well. On the newer version of the board, there is also e separate 2-pin (female or male) external power connector. The board could be powered by a coin cell battery as well or directly through the USBasp programmer. So, with 18+2=20 pins in total, it is more like a tiny breadboard where you can stick some wires or even some parts. Pretty neat, isn’t it?

If you’re not ready yet to prototype your own circuit you can use some of the shields we’ve got. To learn how to make a LED blink you could use the Tinusaur Shield LEDx2 or the upcoming Tinusaur Shield LEDx3. For more advanced topics you could use the Tinusaur Shield EDUx4IO that can help you learn how to work with buttons, produce sounds with a buzzer, read analog data such as light intensity using a photoresistor, and many other things.

In Formal Education

In 2016 it was considered and later officially selected as the platform for the “Microcontrollers and embedded devices” class in St. Cyril and St. Methodius University of Veliko Tarnovo, in Bulgaria. It is now part of the curriculum. As part of that effort, we ran a quick funding campaign and successfully collect all the funds necessary to produce Tinusaur Starter EDU PLUS for each student so they can have on for free, assemble, program, and take them home. It was a huge success – all the students loved it.

Tinusaur Workshop in the University

In 2016, as part of a government-funded initiative “Tvoyat Chas” (in Bulgarian, eng.: “Your Class”) the Tinusaur Project was considered and later chosen as one of the kits to be used for high school students – age between 15 and 17. They just loved it.

In Informal Learning

The Tinusaur Project is very popular in the field of the Informal learning for it is very affordable, easy to learn and work with.

In 2016 as part of a summer school of science organized by UNI4KIDS the Tinusaur Project was used in the electronics, microcontroller and robotics classes. Children of ages between 11 and 17 had the chance to learn how to solder, assemble their very first microcontroller board and program it. It was an incredible experience to work with such smart and motivated young people.

The Tinusaur Workshops

Since 2014 we’ve been organizing 1 or 2-day training workshops where people could get a Tinusaur kit, learn how to solder and assemble it, and write their first microcontroller programs.

Another two-day workshop about microcontrollers, soldering, and Tinusaur

Gifts

On quite a few occasions colleagues of ours bundled Tinusaur Starter 2 kits as part of event gifts or prizes. What a great idea to give something to people that they can use to improve their knowledge and skills.

By Hobbyists

The last on the list but with the highest slice of the pie are the hobbyists. The number of boards we’ve shipped worldwide will soon reach the number 2000 and most of them go to people who would like to learn and make things with microcontrollers and create internet-of-things. The Tinusaur is the perfect start.

Supporters

We ran 2 Indiegogo crowdfunding campaigns. One – very successful, and the other one – semi-successful. That helped us a great deal. First, it proved that the Tinusaur project is something that people like and want to use, and second, it allowed us to start the production on a bit larger scale.

What’s Missing?

We would like, with the help of sponsors, to be able to send Tinusaur kits in parts of the world where people may not be able to afford to buy them. The Tinusaur is very, very inexpensive but still … it may not fit in the budget for some people.

So, if you’d like to help please get in touch with us. We’re open for ideas.

The Tinusaur hardware consists of few small boards with some electronic components on top.They come as assembly kits – small packages with parts.The Tinusaur main board is powered by the Atmel ATtiny85microcontroller.The Tinusaur board comes in parts, all in a small plastic bag, you get the chance to learn how to solder.Don’t worry – it isn’t that complicated – we’re preparing some videos that will walk you through the process. Check the Guides pages for more information.

Once your main board is ready you could use some of our add-on boards, also known as “shields”, to add functionality to your microcontroller system.The Shield LEDx2 board comes in parts, like the main board, you have to assemble it yourself, but it isn’t very complicated.Once you’ve assembled your first boards, you can write your first program.The simplest program you can write is the blinking LED. That is the “Hello World” of the microcontrollers.Next step – little challenge: make both of the LEDs blink.The Tinusaur Shield EDUx4IO board comes in parts too, like the other boards, you have to assemble it yourself, and it isn’t complicated at all.Once you’ve assembled your board, you can write more interesting programs.This shield gives you more options and lets you learn more things.There are 4 different components on it: LED, Buzzer, Button, Photoresistor.Making the LED blink is a good start.The next step is to make the buzzer produce some sound.You can use the button to learn how to read the input data and make your code do different things when you press it.The photoresistor is a component that changes its electrical conductivity depending on the intensity of the light that is applied to it. In other words, you can measure the light intensity with the photoresistor.The LED could work in on/off mode but it could also fade-in and fade-out using what’s called pulse-width modulation or PWM for short.The buzzers could also work with PWM and that could be considered as analog mode i.e. it could produce sound with variable intensity.You could combine all the 4 parts to achieve more interesting results. Like using the button to switch between various modes of your program, or use the photoresistor to trigger different event depending on the light intensity.Now, an interesting trick. What if the LED emits some light, it reflects on an obstacle and goes back to the light sensitive element – our photoresistor. That is a proximity sensor that we’ve just created.A feature “hidden” inside of the microcontroller is an internal temperature sensor. You could make LED blink or buzzer sound if the temperature goes above or below a certain value.We created the Blocktinu platform that will allow you to start with the programming of your Tinusaur microcontroller system really quick.With it, you could simply drag and drop some blocks to implement your algorithms.The platform automatically generates the C source code.And the best part is that you can start learning the C programming language just by looking at the generated source, change your blocks and see how the source code changes.What else you could do with the Tinusaur project?Well, it is up to you to bring your new brilliant ideas to life.Check our website more often to see what new we’ve developed and added to the Tinusaur platform.